


Worth Your While

by Sylien



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Slow Burn, The Great Northern War, The War of the Spanish Succession
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-29 18:04:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8499826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylien/pseuds/Sylien
Summary: The year is 1706 and Venceslava "Vex" and her german-based mercenary group, Vox Machina, finds a starved, white-haired, German speaking Frenchman in a Swedish prison near Russia. They decide to free him, at let him tag along. But there's something off about him, besides being completely out of place. Vex goes to work trying to find out what it is.





	1. October 23rd, 1706

"October 23rd, 1706  
Viborg, Sweden.

It's been four days since the guards last gave me anything to drink or eat. I was lucky the day before yesterday, since the weather bestowed upon me and this wretched city a small storm, making rain pour in through the hole in my wall that the guards call my window. I drank as much as I could muster before the rain stopped. 

Listening carefully, I have heard agitated shouts from the guards, like something abnormal is underfoot, dragging all of them from their usual duties. I have not been able to decipher what it is yet because I sadly do not speak the language, which I have determined to be Russian. We are quite close to Russia, so it makes sense."

Percy had just placed the last period when a large thunderous noise echoed through the building. Everything shook, making him drop the journal and the pencil. He quickly picked them both up, and placed them in his inner pocket, while forcing himself to his feet. He leaned briefly against the wall and then made his way on shaking legs to the door. He didn't stand much these days, he didn't have the energy for it. He could with a disquieting certainty determine that all of his clothing was now 2,5 sizes too large.

Pressing his nose to the bars that made up the window in the wooden door, he looked out into the gapingly empty hallway. No one had come or gone in two days. 

As he stood there, there was another deafening noise, like the one just minutes before, and he once again felt the whole building shake, dust and bits of loose stone falling from the ceiling. He almost lost his balance then, but his grip on the door kept him standing.

Trying to shout out into the hallway "Is someone there?!" left him with nothing but an aching voicebox, from lack of moisture. He tried shouting again, this time switching from his native French to German. Still nothing. 

He stood there for a few minutes, and then decided that the noises were nothing, maybe a nearby thunderstorm that hadn't made it's way to the city yet. He hoped that were the case because he could really use some water.

Sitting down in the remains of the hay pile that had served as his bed for these many months, he collected his jacket around him, trying to shield himself from the ever steady flow of freezing wind coming through the wall window.

He still had no idea why they had let him keep all his possessions. Had it not been because his gunpowder had gotten wet on the first night here, and the wet remains taken from him on the second, he would have escaped quite quickly. Now here he was, 4 months later, sitting in a two by two meter prison cell on his own, with the mushy and slowly decaying remains of his clothing wrapped around him. It was the only thing keeping the freezing October wind from giving him frostbite. 

As he sat there, pondering his unfortunate situation for god knows how long, he began to feel a warming in the air, slowly followed by the scent of burning wood. He stilled for a moment and pondered the scent before he realized; fire. Fire that was close. Standing up again, he walked to the window in the wall.

"Merde," he said, slowly, dragging the word out, as he saw fire and smoke rising from the building below, next to the prison tower. Looking down into the street he recognized Swedish soldiers, furiously trying to create a water chain from the nearest well, to no avail. Black smoke rises from the building, and the wind is throwing it in his direction, he now sees. It won't be long before this building will catch on fire too, he reckons. A few hours, tops.

He sits down.

-  
The Swedes didn't pay very well. That was the first thing Venceslava had noticed when she had arrived in this horrible, sad little town. She and her little band of misfits had been hired to deliver a letter in person, to the Bååt family, from their relatives in Småland. A meaningless little task, but it had paid alright, she had thought initially. Until she had actually arrived, that was. Now nothing could have made her take the job in hindsight. Especially now that she knew that there was a Russian army on the doorstep to the city, bombarding it heavily, which was just the kind of luck her mercenary band, Vox Machina, and she usually had.

"Hovno!" she cursed, as she saw the pub they had just backed out of getting hit by a mortar cannon shot, knocking the roof in. And lighting it on fire. There was a pandemonium of noise all around them, fire, buildings collapsing and people screaming.

"Bratr, this way!" She shouted, as she grabbed a fistful of her brother's jacket, and dragged him into an alley, the rest of their little party following shortly. Seeing the city wall at the end of the alley, they all started sprinting towards it. They needed to get out, now. Fire and cities were never good bedfellows, and eventually most people would be trying to flee, so better to be among the first to get out.

Jumping over crates and barrels blocking the way, they all came to a grinding halt, now face to face with the wall. "Kiki, Grog, do you see an exit? Anything?" she shouted in German to the two people nearest to her. "Nej, I don't see anything!" Grog shouted back, and Kiki followed with a "Sorry Vex, me neither!". Turning around she saw her friends and brother scouting about, trying to determine if they could see a way out. 

Looking to Kiki she shouted "Follow me! The rest of you, stay here. We'll find somewhere high up, and see if we can find a way out of here!". And so they ran back the way they came, Trinket right in her heels as always, looking for any tall building. 

It didn't take them long before they saw a giant round white stone building, that stood at least two stories taller than everything else.  
Running to the building, they found that the giant steel-enforced door was unlocked. Strange, but lucky for them, and so they make their way up.

-  
Perceval was staring at the ceiling, looking at the steady flow of black smoke entering the room through the window. His assumption that he had been forgotten seemed to be correct. 'What does it matter anyway, if the prison burns down with a few inmates still inside? it's not like they are going to be missed' he thought to himself. 

His mother had always reprimanded him about thinking such melancholy thoughts, saying that they would manifest and corrupt his brain. She had then made him carry around a sigil against negative thoughts, so ease his mind. It had worked, for a time. He didn't have the drawing of the sigil on his person anymore. He had lost it at some point during the last 5 years. He didn't even remember what the sigil looked like. Didn't really matter anyway, though, he wouldn't have carried it anymore if he still had had it. He felt that he deserved his anger. 

"Kiki! It's this way to the top!" 

A sentence shouted in a heavily accented german pulled him from his thoughts. On instinct he started to open his mouth, about to shout, but his breath caught on the blackened air, making him cough uncontrollably instead, sadly little more than a wheezing sound.

He heard two female voices approaching at a rapid speed, and then right past his cell, further up the tower. 'Merde', he thought as his throat cleared up slowly, but he knew that he had another chance, but only one because they had to come down the same way. So he stood up by the door and waited. 

-  
Making it to the roof of what had turned out to be a prison, Vex and Kiki stood at the edge, trying to find their friends at the city wall. Kiki spotted them first and followed by Vex seeing the gate out of the city, a few roads away from where the rest of their party were standing, indented into the wall. That's why they missed it. They also saw that their friends had managed to place themselves in a safe spot, as there were no immediate fires anywhere close to them. 

And so they made their way back down again, at a less crushing speed than before. Stepping off the staircase to the roof, they jogged past the empty cells in the hallway until they heard a "Hey, over here!" from one of the cells, a raspy male voice shouting, and saw a gloved hand reaching out through the barred hole in a wooden door. 

"Please let me out, the guards have forgotten about me, I'm starving, the fire is coming, please!" the male voice pleaded, in perfect german, a tone of desperation very apparent. Vex held up a clenched fist, signaling Kiki to stop running, and she did, joining her in the hallway. They exchanged a look of apprehension, both at the sudden appearance of a man, who didn't seem to be there on the way up, who speaks german even though they are in Sweden and because this is a prison after all. With a short nod from Kiki, they decided to slowly walk over to the door, standing far enough away so that the man couldn't reach them.

He was younger than they expected from the voice. His face looked gaunt, he was covered in dirt and filth, and his hair looked gray, so he must be in his mid-thirties at the earliest, despite not having a single wrinkle. He was wearing what remained of a strange pair of glasses with extra lenses, but the extra lenses had been broken and bent, and a piece of the glass on the left major lens was missing. More than that Vex couldn't make out, the hole in the door was not big enough.

"Who are you, why are you here, and why should we let you out?" She asked quickly. She didn't care if he had stolen something like a piece of bread, god knows all of the people in Vox Machina had done worse, and her brother especially had stolen worse, but if he was a rapist or something, she would just let him rot. 

"My name is Perceval de Rolo, I don't know why I'm here, and because I will make it worth your while" He answered, now more calm. His name sounded French. Due to the current war her country was in with the french over the crown of Spain, Vex didn't much like Frenchmen. She had dealt with enough of them back in Prague, to know them to be an annoying people. But if there was money in helping him out, she might consider it, but she needed a better explanation to his prolonged vacation from the free world than 'I don't know'.

"I ask again, why are you here? I need something better than I don't know" She looked him dead in the eye as she said this, and his eyes stared unrelentingly back at her, a very light blue color. 

"I was caught trying to break into a house" he looked down briefly as he said this, and then looked quickly back up again. "Is that satisfactory?" he asked, no emotion displaying on his face at all. He looked tired. He might be lying, though.

Turning to look at Kiki then, who's face was twisted into a look of sympathy as she continued to look at Perceval, she asked "Kiki?" forcing her attention onto Vex.

"Vex, you can't just let him die here," Kiki said, earnestly. Vex looked at Kiki for a long while, the yelling outside eventually forcing her to make a decision. She sighed. 

"Okay, don't make me regret this. And it better be worth my while!" She said as she turned around, looking the tired man in the eye one last time, before getting her lockpicking set out of her rucksack, kneeling down and starting to work on unlocking the door.

After a while the door swung open, revealing a man in much better attire than would be expected of a prisoner. A well-made dark blue jacket decorated with epaulets, like he was from the french military, over a stiff vest and shirt. The shirt might have been white at one point, but it certainly wasn't anymore.  
While Vex was busy studying the man's clothing he stabilized himself against a wall, smiling to himself for a moment, before they were both interrupted by another mortar shot, hitting nearby, dragging both of them out of their daze.

"Oh yes, we should get going, this way!" Shouted Kiki, a grin lighting up her face, as she motioned to Perceval and Vex to join her in walking down the hallway leading down and out for the tower. Kiki rather did like when they did nice things, such as rescuing wayward prisoners. It made her feel good about herself, Vex knew. It just made Vex a bit anxious, if she was being perfectly honest, since they never actually knew who they were helping, and to whose benefit. 

"I'm Kiki by the way, nice to meet you!" Kiki said excitedly, as she grabbed the man's arm and flung it over her shoulder, to carry some of his weight so he could walk easier. It helped their speed a bit, and in a short while, they were out of the tower.

Seeing Perceval looking confused around at the destruction around them she said: "Oh yeah, the Russians are attacking, we are leaving, so you should probably leave as well if you want to live". 

She motioned for Kiki to let him go, and join her, which Kiki didn't see since she was smiling up at Perceval, saying "You can come with us if you want?", to which Perceval quickly answered "I'd love to" and adjusted his grip on Kiki. Vex signed, but she quickly decided that now wasn't the time to argue and that they needed to find her brother and the others.

Scouting ahead for eventual collapsed buildings and fires in their way, Vex guided Kiki with Perceval in tow back to the others, who looked rather confused at seeing them return with a third person, who could barely stand.

Gregor, called Grog, stepped up instantly, picked Perceval up bridal style, and together they walked towards the city gate, finally leaving this wretched town, and it's untimely siege behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! First proper fanfiction, that will have plot, historic research and, apparently, no beta.
> 
> The battle in question is the Siege of Vyborg, that only actually spanned a few days, where the Russians tried to claim the city from the Swedes. They succeeded a few months later, and the town is still Russian today. Percy is sitting in the Round Tower which still stands, built in the 16th century. It was a prison, a warehouse, and a bunch of other things, but now it is a restaurant.


	2. October 24th, 1706

Percy woke up to the smell of meat roasting, wood burning, and bright light, and he sprung upright in an instant. Realizing quickly that the fire wasn't around him as he had initially feared, but in front of him, build from actual firewood, and circled by stones, he laid back down again.

The ginger woman, Kiki, she'd said, looked at him and smiled. She was wearing an ochre dress with green details, finely stitched in hand, in a design that didn't look like anything he'd seen before. Her hair was wild, curly, and very long, ending at her waist, and keeping the whole thing in place was a thin brown ribbon, circling her forehead and temples, bound together somewhere on the back of her head, beneath the hair. It reminded him briefly of something his little sister used to wear when she was a girl. Though her ribbons had been a light blue color.

"There you are, I thought you were never gonna wake up. Grog was getting pretty tired of carrying you too, so we thought we might make camp, and cook some dinner" she said, sitting down near him, with a tin bowl filled with some kind of roast meat, some bread, and some stewed cabbage. 

"You look like you haven't been given a lot to eat for a long while, so try to just eat slowly, you need to give your body time to adapt to being given normal food again, okay?" Percy looked at her as she talked, not really listening, but he nodded anyway. This girl really liked to talk. He would like that too, eventually, but right now; "Can I get some water, please?" he said, his voice almost a whisper, while now staring at his bowl in front of him, placed on the ground. 

"Oh yeah! Sorry!" Kiki said while frantically getting up and filling a mug with some water for him, from a large waterskin. He emptied it in one big gulp and handed the mug back to her. She just took it, filled it up again, and handed it back to him, with a small smile on her face. He emptied half of the second mug, before sighing heavily, placing the mug on the ground and picking up on the bowl, diving into the piece of bread. 

He had always heard that people thought regular food tasted magnificent after having been given scraps for a while, but he could now confirm this to be the truth. It was just a bite of bread, but the bread was freshly baked, filled with seeds and kernels, and absolutely delicious. Not like the stale or molded leftovers he'd been given in the prison. 'Oh gods' he thought to himself, realizing. "I'm out of prison," he said out loud with a tone of complete disbelief, staring straight ahead, at the redhead in front of him. "Thank you. Thank you so, so much" he must be looking like a mess, soot, and dirt all over him, but they had helped him anyway. 

"Happy to help! Though I know that Vex wanted to talk to you when you woke up, but she, her brother and Trinket are off hunting, so it might be a bit before she comes back" Kiki rambled, and he tried listening to her but the only thing he actually managed to catch was that someone named Trinket was with them. "Who's Trinket?" he asked, his mouth now filled with what had turned out to be pork. 

Kiki laughed at that. How odd, how the sound of someone laughing was something you could miss so much. "He is Vex' dog. He is quite a smart one at that, never met a dog like it, but then again, I've haven't met that many Bohemian dogs, so he might just be from a country where they are smarter than the ones we have up in Scotland" She had now grabbed her own bowl and had started eating. He looked around for a bit then, noticing that they were in a clearing in a forest and that he was covered in some kind of fur. A lot of bedrolls had been placed all around the fire that Kiki had been cooking over, placed in the middle of their little camp. 

"So Vex and her brother are Bohemian? And you're from Scotland? Where are the rest of you from?" He had derived such from her previous statement, and Kiki nodded along to the first two questions, before stopping to think about the third. This was when Percy noticed that none of the others seemed to have joined them, and he wondered for a moment where they had gone.

"First thing you might need to know, to not make everything too complicated, is that we all have nicknames for one another because we are from such different places, that our full names might be difficult for the others to pronounce. And luckily we have all spent enough time in the Holy Roman Empire, to speak proper German" She stopped, drank some water from her mug, and continued "But only Venceslava, called Vex, and her twin brother Vavrinec, called Vax, are actually from the Holy Roman Empire. They grew up in Prague from what I believe" Percy nodded at that. He knew that most Bohemians only spoke the Czech language, so that's why her german was so heavily accented. 

"The big guy who carried you, that is Gregor, called Grog. He from Denmark, along with the small blonde woman, Petrine, whom we call Pike. They've grown up together apparently". Percy did vaguely remember the very large man who had just picked him up like he was made of feathers, and with how much weight he had lost he might as well have been, but it was still a feat of strength he had rarely seen before.

"That leaves Scanlan, the small brown haired man. He is Irish, and we don't actually know his name, he says that it's too long, but his clan name is O'Scanlan so that's where his nickname is from. And my name is Keelin, the others call me Kiki, and I am from the Scotland highlands, way up north, from a little village up there." Ahh, those two he would relate more to than the others. He knew English better than German, as he had done much more business with the English, the Irish and the Scots, than the Germans. That is what you get when you make your living trading in the English channel. And when half of your family tree consists of Englishmen. 

Kiki had finished her food and was now looking at him, with a bit of an anxious look on her face. "Now you know a bit about us. But who are you? We got your name, Perceval de Rolo, but that's really all you gave us" She stated, putting her bowl away behind her, and sat up a bit, collecting her feet underneath her. 

Percy sighed. He had made a habit of arriving as a ghost and leaving as a ghost, not interacting with anyone, and not telling anyone anything real about him. He had done so for 5 years. But these people had saved his life, so he felt that he owed them.  
"I am French, from the Normandy. My family used to govern a thriving trading town there, called Pierre Blanche, where we traded with the English, the Irish and the Scots, mostly. We have governed the trading town for many generations, so we were quite well established. That sadly came apart a few years back, and now I'm here." 

He had gotten started rather well, but he couldn't bare to continue and so, stopped himself. "Any specific reason why you're here, of all places?" She asked as she looked at him with a weird look on her face, one that was a mix of confusion and pity. Percy rather disliked the look. 

"I was trying to find a family member, turned out I had been given the wrong address and got arrested trying to use the key I'd been given, on the door" He looked her in the eye as he lied. It made it easier for both of then that she didn't know the full truth. And most people thought that liars looked away when they lied. Percy had learned to do the opposite. She probably wouldn't notice.

That's when there was a sound from nearby as Vex, her brother, Vax, and the dog, Trinket, approached from behind some trees. They were carrying two rabbits each, and Vex was also carrying a big fat duck. A bow was slung over her back, a quiver placed at her hip. "We've now got enough food for another meal, even for Grog, which is always preferable. Wouldn't want our meat shield to go hungry, now would we?" Vex joked as she approached the camp.

Percy hadn't really looked at her, when he had first met her, it wasn't really as if he had had mental space to think about such things as looks, but now he was looking. She looked, in a way, French, which was the highest of compliments, coming from a Frenchman. That wasn't attributed to her physical looks as much as her whole mannerism. Her black hair was collected in a braid which was decorated with bright blue feathers, and where most women would have been wearing a dress, like Kiki was, Vex was wearing trousers. Percy had never thought about trousers on a woman, but when Vex turned around to place the pheasant and rabbits on the ground, he quickly came to the conclusion that he liked them, and immediately looked down at his bowl to hide his face. He then gathered some of the stewed cabbage on another piece of bread and continued eating. 

"Oh, you are finally awake! Thought you weren't gonna make it!" Vex said as she sat down near Kiki with her own bowl of food. "So have you grilled him for all the saucy details, yet?" Vex then asked Kiki, and she winked at her as she did, actually winked at her! That was unusual. She was unusual it seemed. "Not really, but he is a french noble apparently," Kiki said and smiled up at Vex. Kiki was now sipping from a mug of hot tea of some sort. Herbal, from the smell.  
"A noble! It makes sense then, why I found this while going through your pockets!" Vex said, and pulled out a small pouch, and wait, that was Percy's belt pouch! 

Percy was about to protest when Vex just held up a hand, effectively stopping him before he managed to get a word in, and said: "Consider it payment, for us letting you out, giving you food, and for the continued care you will get from us over the next few days, as you get your strength back, sound good?" She said with a smile and another wink, now directed at him, and Percy was left stunned, just looking at her like she wasn't even human. There were 5 English pounds in that belt pouch!

Thinking it over quickly, there was no point in trying to persuade her to give him even some of his money back. He had nothing to barter with, she held all the cards, as it were, and he didn't have strength enough to fight for it physically. For a woman, she did have quite a lot of muscles, which wasn't something Percy was used to seeing. If he was being perfectly honest, he wasn't sure he would have been able to take her on, even back when he had been in peak physical shape, 5 years prior.

So he did the next best thing to bargaining or fighting. The thing any highborn who had been outmaneuvered fairly should do. Concede with grace. Well, as much grace as was needed when conceding to common folk.

"I accept your terms, as long as you will also escort me to the nearest town of a reasonable size, so I might regain some funds on my own, before you leave me to continue your other endeavours" Vex was looking rather gleeful at that, which was becoming of her, and she looked to her brother, whom Percy hadn't even noticed had sat down next to them. "Should we accept those terms, Bratr? Or should we just take the poor nobleman's money and leave him to die in the cold?" She was smiling as she said this, and she said it in German, so he was meant to hear it, but he still couldn't quite tell if she was being serious. He hoped not.

"I suppose we can take him with us to Tallinn, it's not terribly far, and we are heading in that direction anyway. Away from the Russians, which I've found to always be the right direction in any given circumstance" Vax had the same little grin on his face as his sister as he answered her. It was rather becoming of him as well, Percy couldn't help but think. Gods, the prolonged prison stay must have messed with his head, he thought to himself, shaking the thought from his mind. He must have been deprived of smiles, is all. 

A nudge on his shoulder brought him back to the real world, and he looked up to see Kiki standing, holding out a ceramic mug filled with tea for him. "Drink this, it will help your body regain some strength. And it will help you sleep, which you need". Looking down into the mug, he found that there were no leaves in it, so Kiki must have strained it. Not that he would have been able to tell what herbs they were if the leaves had still been in. His sister had always laughed at him for being so bad at herbs. It just wasn't that interesting to him, so he never put the energy into learning their properties properly. He had regretted that since.

Seemed that Kiki knew more than he did, though, and he was surprised to realize that he trusted her already. What a curious bunch of people these were, to draw trust out of him so quickly. He took a sip. It tasted almost sweet, in a way, like peas. He emptied the mug quickly. Not long passed before he was ready to let sleep take him, and before he knew it he was lying down again, covered in nice warm furs, near a proper fire, his belly filled with meat, bread, and stew, and at least one trusted ally nearby. It was the best sleep he had had in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Percy is a typical middle of the road nobleman. He has enjoyed the typical nobleman's upbringing with a few atypical additions.  
> Nothing particularly historical in this chapter.


End file.
